Vintages New Release Collection – September 26, 2026

SPIRIT OF SUSTAINABILITY

At LCBO, we’re focused on building a more sustainable future through our Spirit of Sustainability initiative, which celebrates trade partners who work to promote diversity and inclusion, community investment and sound environmental practices. Learn more at LCBO.com/sustainability .

It’s an exciting time at Cave Spring Vineyard. “It’s kind of surreal,” says chief operating oicer and head winemaker Gabriel Demarco. “It’s over a decade of work that’s all culminating at the same time.” Since their founding 40 years ago this year, Cave Spring have been at the forefront of Ontario wine. They were among the first to plant vinifera in Niagara, were a founding member of the Vintners Quality Alliance (VQA), and were the province’s first Sustainable Winegrowing Ontario certified winery. “We’re not passively sustainable, we’re aggressively sustainable,” says Demarco. “We’re obsessed with finding solutions.” Not surprisingly, given their history, many of these solutions are the first of their kind. Nine years ago, Cave Spring installed North America’s first BioGill wastewater recycling system. This technology uses natural bacteria to reduce environmentally damaging bio-contaminants in wastewater. They’ve also joined a group of companies to bring to market a new approach to an old problem: using light-based technology to control weeds. “It would be a globally novel

technology that’s also gentle on the environment, and it challenges the current understanding of what you can do with lighting as a tool,” says Demarco. “We are very close.” In the meantime, their five-year-old cover-crop trial launched in collabo ration with the provincial government is showing excellent results. “We’ve found domestic weed species that can grow under the vine, not hit the fruit zone, and out-compete [harmful] weeds,” says Demarco, “So no herbicides. We just have to mow it twice a year.” A sustainability journey can take you to exciting, unexpected places. “We found our own yeast,” says Demarco. “When we started wild-fermenting all our table wine nearly 10 years ago, I noticed that all the tanks showed dierent fermentation kinetics.” Demarco, who has a degree in biochemistry, took his findings to Brock University and, after following six fermentations, they found 600 strains of yeast. From there, Demarco was able to isolate and validate Cave Spring’s own yeast from their 1974 Chardonnay planting. This gives Cave Spring the ability to make sparkling wine and Icewine without relying on imported yeast. Further

more, the funding Brock University received for the project has allowed them to purchase more equipment and further their studies of native yeasts. “It’s a huge step for the industry,” says Demarco. “And we were the first to do it.” Cave Spring are also leading the way in the quest for locally sourced wine vessels. “We’ve partnered with a local concrete artisan, taken ground up stone from the top of the Niagara Escarpment, integrated it into local concrete, and we’re making domestic concrete vessels,” says Demarco. “We’re not purchasing and shipping containers of goods all over the globe. The concrete artisan is sourcing materials and making vessels within two kilometres of the winery.” For a winery so passionately focused on expressing terroir, it’s a dream come true to produce a wine that, from the fruit to the yeast to the ageing vessel, is 100% sourced from a single region. “Even 40 years in, we’re still pushing the envelope,” says Demarco, “and it’s really exciting.”

VINTAGES